Frenchie Mae Cumpio, a 26-year-old journalist, has spent almost six years in jail. A court in the central Philippines port city of Tacloban recently convicted her of “financing terrorism” and sentenced her — alongside church worker Marielle Domequil — to 12- 18 years imprisonment. At the same time, they were acquitted of separate firearms and explosives charges that the government once touted so loudly, claiming they had found a gun and a grenade in a 2020 police and military raid on a boarding house that first landed Cumpio behind bars.
That means Cumpio has spent nearly six years in pre-trial detention. The process and the result offers a snapshot of how counterterrorism laws can be manipulated into political tools.
The Philippines does not have to invent terrorism to justify counterterrorism. There is a real communist insurgency. There are real extremist groups. There are real victims. The problem is that “terrorism” has become the state’s all-purpose solvent: it dissolves the presumption of innocence; it turns ordinary civic work into suspicious behavior; it makes solidarity itself look like complicity.
And because “terror financing” sounds technical — bank accounts, compliance, global standards — it can be even more effective. It comes with the aura of boring competence: spreadsheets, regulations, “best practice.” That aura matters, because it dulls the moral alarm bells. It turns an argument about rights and power into a question of “financial integrity.” It shifts the conversation from “What evidence?” to “Why are you defending suspects?”
This is why the Cumpio case cannot be treated as an isolated press freedom scandal. It should be read as a warning about how the language and machinery of countering terrorism financing can be repurposed – domestically, and in any country — as lawfare.
“Terror Financing” as Punishment Before Trial
What makes terrorism-financing allegations uniquely coercive is that punishment can start before a verdict — sometimes long before a verdict.
Even when authorities insist they are merely “investigating,” the label triggers cascading harms: reputational ruin, isolation, de-platforming, and institutional “de-risking” by banks and donors. In many jurisdictions, suspicion alone can justify enhanced surveillance, restrictions, and asset freezes. Cumpio and Domequil’s lengthy pre-trial detention is one example of many cases occurring internationally and reported on by the likes of Lebanese organization Act For Human Rights and the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.
In practice, that means ordinary civic life becomes precarious for anyone in the blast radius of an accusation.
This is the structural problem: terrorism financing is not merely another charge. It is a status category — “tainted” — that can follow a person or organization regardless of eventual outcome. Trials can then become slow-motion theater behind a headline that does its work immediately.
In Cumpio’s case, international reporting and press freedom advocates describe an environment in which “red-tagging” — branding journalists and activists as communist fronts — can precede harassment, raids, and prolonged detention. It was enough for a United Nations Special Rapporteur to express “dismay” and declare that the arrest and charges “appear to have been filed in retaliation for her work as a journalist.” Whatever one makes of every contested detail in the raid narrative, the broader pattern is difficult to ignore: sensational claims, long detention, and a counter-terror context that renders normal scrutiny and questioning of the authorities’ actions socially and institutionally costly.
The Incentive Structure: Performance, Compliance, and “Showing Action”
Human Rights Watch warned in early 2025 that Philippine authorities were filing baseless terrorism-financing charges against civil society groups and activists, apparently to satisfy the global intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which had placed the country on a “grey list” of jurisdictions that it assessed didn’t meet the task force standards to curb money laundering and terrorism financing. “Grey listing” places a country under increased monitoring and creates strong incentives to demonstrate visible enforcement activity — sometimes in ways that reward quantity over integrity.
Amnesty International issued similar alarms, arguing that domestic counter-terror laws in the Philippines — including the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 and the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act of 2012 — were being misused to target development, humanitarian, and human rights organizations.
These are not casual claims. They point to an incentive structure that outside observers such as the World Bank or the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime often underestimate.
A government that wants to look tough on insurgency — and disciplined on financial regulation — can be tempted to treat prosecutions as performance. You don’t need to win cleanly. You just need to chill critics, frighten donors of innocent organizations, and persuade banks to stop touching anyone who might cause reputational trouble. And because FATF-style compliance narratives reward visible “enforcement,” there is a ready-made international grammar for selling the crackdown: “risk mitigation,” “financial integrity,” “countering terror finance.” In plain terms, the concern is that external monitoring pressure can create a “deliverables” dynamic: authorities feel compelled to show outputs — cases filed, accounts frozen, investigations launched — even when the underlying evidence is thin or politically motivated.
That does not mean international standards cause abuse. But they can be manipulated and wielded against the innocent. The optics of compliance can be used to legitimize domestic political objectives.
Red-Tagging Meets Terror Finance: From Stigma to Criminalization
Cumpio’s case matters because it teaches the rest of society what happens when someone reports on military abuses, police violence, or rural land disputes — the kinds of stories that embarrass powerful people. The state alleges Cumpio and Domequil provided support to the New People’s Army in 2019; the verdict was condemned by press freedom advocates, while anti-communist officials celebrated it. This follows from how compliance systems work in practice: banks and donors respond to designation risk by cutting ties, and governments seeking to signal enforcement strength can point to the existence of investigations, charges, or freezes as “proof of action” — even before any facts are tested in court
But the critical analytic point is not the prosecution’s narrative. It is the sequence: label first, isolate second, prosecute third — and keep the process slow enough that the public eventually gets distracted and the process itself becomes punishment.
Global Witness, a U.K.-based investigative nonprofit, has described an escalation in such discrediting campaigns, or “red-tagging, when legitimate activists are falsely branded as terrorists, even though many cases are dismissed for lack of merit. In one notable case, that of activist and former member of the country’s House of Representatives Siegfred D. Deduro, even the country’s Supreme Court in May 2024 had to admit the case was an example of abuse of power. The dynamic is familiar: “red-tagging” functions much like McCarthy-era anti-communist “red-baiting” in the United States, in that critics are branded as subversives in order to delegitimize them, isolate them, and make punitive state action more socially acceptable. That is exactly how lawfare functions: it does not need reliable convictions across the board to achieve political effects. It needs uncertainty, cost, and fear.
And “terror finance” is particularly effective for that purpose because it deputizes third parties. Banks and donors are not neutral actors in this drama: they are coerced into it by compliance risk. When the state raises the terror label, institutions often respond by cutting ties — not because they have seen evidence, but because they cannot afford exposure.
Why This Matters to National Security Lawyers (Not Only Human Rights Advocates)
It is tempting to treat this as a familiar rights-versus-security argument. But terror-financing cases based on weak or nonexistent evidence are not just rights abuses. They are also bad security policy.
Counter-terrorism depends on legitimacy. When terror financing allegations are seen as politically motivated, every future case becomes harder to prosecute credibly — including genuine ones. The public becomes cynical. Communities disengage. Cooperation declines. Intelligence becomes more important. Authorities may win headlines while losing trust — and trust is a core security asset.
The second reason it matters is strategic: civil society organizations are not peripheral in the Philippines. They are often the ones providing services in conflict-affected areas, documenting abuses, mediating disputes, and delivering humanitarian relief in a climate-vulnerable country. When NGOs are terror-tagged, communities lose capacity — and the state hollows out the very social infrastructure that reduces radicalization risk and stabilizes fragile regions.
The Quiet Complicity Problem: “Expertise” Without Evidence
There is another ingredient in this story that deserves bluntness: the production of authority.
“Terror financing” commentary about the Philippines too often – and perhaps increasingly — gestures at “risk” and “vulnerability” while failing to substantiate headline claims with concrete cases, verifiable data, or basic evidentiary discipline. Certainly, terrorist financing exists. But there should be standards and thresholds for what constitutes such violations.
Recent examples include commentary alleging cryptocurrency use by Filipino “terrorists” while providing no publicly testable evidence. In several cases, the claims are repeated from “research” published that lacks rigorous peer review, which can lend an academic veneer without supplying underlying data or attribution. The effect is that a speculative narrative hardens into conventional wisdom — especially when the novelty of fintech/crypto makes the story feel inherently plausible.
This dynamic doesn’t require nefarious intent. It can be driven by novelty bias, time pressure, and a tendency to defer to institutional-sounding research. But it also aligns with an enforcement incentive structure: governments under international pressure to demonstrate counter–terrorist financing action may benefit when untested allegations circulate as “common knowledge.” If evidentiary standards aren’t insisted upon, that narrative can become a permissive backdrop for lawfare and overbroad coercive powers.
Ultimately, the evidentiary test is straightforward: (1) show the auditable on the blockchain, and (2) demonstrate the linkage between that activity and specific individuals or organizations.
Commentary and other writings that could be seized upon to justify coercive state power must be held to the evidentiary burden that seriousness requires, because this is how repression gets a suit and tie. Weak claims get laundered into respectable-sounding prose. The state doesn’t have to cite propaganda; it can cite “research.”
Perhaps in some instances it is unwitting. The effect remains.
The people who pay are not the academics responsible for disseminating these rhetorical weapons. They’re journalists like Cumpio. Church workers like Domequil. Community organizers who discover that “countering terror financing” is not a niche compliance topic but a lived reality: a cage built from paperwork.
What Safeguards Look Like (and Why They’re Pro-Security)
The Philippines can protect its citizens without turning counterterrorism into a domestic political weapon. It can meet international standards without criminalizing civil society. But that requires a change of posture: from spectacle to scrutiny; from intimidation to due process; from punishing dissent to proving wrongdoing.
A number of concrete safeguards would reduce abuse while preserving legitimate counter-terror capability:
1) Raise evidentiary thresholds for terrorism-financing charges and designations. Where “terror finance” is alleged, courts should require specific, testable links: what money, what route, what recipient, what intent, what corroboration — and what independent verification.
2) Tighten judicial procedures and processes for freezing assets and determining designations. Any framework that enables freezes or designations should include prompt notice (with limited, justified redactions), meaningful public access to the case against the accused, a rapid hearing timeline, and a real ability to contest the charges.
3) End red-tagging by state bodies and state-adjacent actors. Red-tagging is not merely rhetoric; it is a coercive precursor. It primes society to accept abusive enforcement and poisons the evidentiary ecosystem by turning political labeling into “intelligence.” These safeguards require action by specific actors: legislators should tighten the legal thresholds; courts should enforce strict evidentiary and speedy-trial standards; financial regulators should prevent compliance tools from becoming punishment without proof; and international partners should condition support on due process and evidentiary integrity
4) Reduce punitive pre-trial detention and enforce speedy trial norms. If the state cannot prosecute promptly, it should not be permitted to imprison people in limbo. Speedy trial reforms are not “soft.” They are a basic condition of legitimate power.
5) Demand higher standards from international partners and compliance regimes like the FATF, World Bank, and IMF. This is not about the FATF alone. It includes donor governments, multilateral partners, and capacity-building providers that sometimes treat higher case numbers, more freezes, or more designations as “progress. FATF-style evaluations can shape incentives, but bilateral partners and international assistance programs also influence what gets rewarded and reported as success. International actors should stop treating “more terror finance cases” as evidence of progress through pressure on countries like the Philippines for AMLC (Anti Money Laundering Council) “wins. The relevant metric is not volume but integrity: cases must meet evidentiary standards, preserve due process, and avoid turning civil society into a compliance scapegoat.
The Bottom Line
Counter-terror laws thrive on fear and vagueness. Democracy survives on specificity.
When the Philippines says “terrorism financing,” the right response is not reflexive deference to the label. It is insistence on the boring details: What evidence? What money? What chain of custody? What corroboration? What was tested in open court?
If the public — and this goes for any country, not only the Philippines — wants counterterrorism that is effective rather than performative and if they want rights such as those they usually enjoy to be respected, they must stop being impressed by the label and start demanding proof.
– Tom Smith, Published courtesy of Just Security.
